Linux for Suits - Beyond Blogging's Black Holes

With death threats and other terrorism, blogging ain't what it used to be.

On the evening of March 27, 2007, I was a guest speaker at an evening
class called Marketing 203, at a local community college. I was there to
talk about blogging. Partway into my talk, the teacher, operating the
classroom's built-in computer, put Technorati up on a screen in front of
the room. I told him to click on one of the Top Search links. There, in
the first item at the top of the screen, was my name, associated somehow
with “death threats”. For me, that marked the beginning of the end of
Blogging as Usual. And I don't think I'm alone.

The original death threats were issued by an anonymous coward in the
lively comments section of the blog by a veteran game developer, book
author and speaker at tech conferences. I'll call her Barbara. (I am not
naming names other than my own, because this column will find its way to
the Web, and I don't want search engines to associate any of those names
with the controversy that followed or further smudge any party's
already-muddied reputation.) The original comments didn't bother Barbara
too much, but she found her fears moving over an edge when a number of
especially nasty posts appeared at “blogs authored and/or owned by a
group that includes prominent bloggers...”, she said.

I know the people who put up those blogs. They are friends of mine. I
also know why they put those blogs up: to commit satire, lampoonery and
other acts of fun at the (presumably tolerable) expense of familiar
figures in the blogosphere. But, things got out of control. Rather than
making fun, they made fear. A few of the posts were not only
misogynistic and cruel, but threatening as well—or could easily
be seen that way. None of the worst posts were made by people I knew (at
least not that I know of), but guilt was implied by context and
association. Long story short, things became FUBAR, and the sites were
taken down.

Meanwhile, Barbara wrote in her blog post that she would not come to the
conference where she was slated to speak that week, and that she was
zero-basing her future in an on-line world where she had been a prominent
fixture:

I do not want to be part of a culture—the Blogosphere—where this
is considered acceptable. Where the price for being a blogger is
kevlar-coated skin and daughters who are tough enough not to have
their “widdy biddy sensibilities offended” when they see their own
mother Photoshopped into nothing more than an objectified sexual
orifice, possibly suffocated as part of some sexual fetish. (And of
course all coming on the heels of more explicit threats.)

I do not want to be part of a culture where this is done not by some
random person, but by some of the most respected people in the tech
blogging world. People linked to by A-listers like Doc Searls...I
do not want to be part of a culture of such hypocrisy....

For more than a week following Barbara's original post, her name was the
top search term on Technorati. To put this in context, consider the fact
that Technorati—the blogosphere's main search engine—began as a
hack by David Sifry in the fall of 2002 to help the two of us write a
feature on blogging that ran in the January 2003 issue of Linux
Journal.
The whole thing lived on a Penguin Computing box in David's basement,
serving the world through a DSL line. Now David has lost count of
Technorati's servers, and the engine's traffic rank on Alexa now
averages in the top 200, worldwide. In the US today (late April 2007) it's
#59—out of billions. According to Technorati's stats, there are now
more than 72 million blogs, with 120,000 more coming on-line every day. No
wonder the controversy became named after Barbara, starting minutes
after her post went up. No wonder she's put up only one post since: a
“best of” collection of the informative and lighthearted graphics that
were her specialty.

As of right now (a couple months before you read this), Barbara is done
as a blogger. I hope she comes back and starts to contribute again, but
I can understand why she might not. The old 'sphere ain't the same. And,
the problem isn't just incivility and flamage. As old hands know, that's
been around for the duration and will never go away. The problem is
blogging itself. Somehow it's becoming more like TV and less like what
made it great to begin with.

A few years back, Don Norman said, “Microsoft is a conversational black
hole. Drop the subject into the middle of a room and it sucks everybody
into a useless place from which no light can escape.” Microsoft doesn't
have that kind of gravity anymore, thank goodness, but the black hole
metaphor still serves for any subject with an event horizon that exceeds
the conversational space that surrounds it.

This controversy became one of those holes. I realized after several
posts that there was no way I could blog about it without doing more
harm than good—for two reasons. One was the nature of the controversy itself.
Once something becomes a Hot Topic, opinions get polarized, and people
start forming buzzy hives around one position or another. The other was
the persistent absence of hard facts. Nobody knew who made the original
death-threat comments. And, nobody knew who made the most offensive
posts, some of which appear to have come from a familiar blogger who
insisted that his identity was hijacked while his servers were trashed.
(He did that insisting through an e-mail to me that he asked me to share
with the rest of the world.) Nobody was willing to press him hard on the
issue or to mount a criminal-grade investigation. Meanwhile, the posts
piled up until the ratio of opinion to fact verged on the absolute. At
some point I came to realize that nothing I could say—no matter how
insightful—would help if it took the form of opinion rather than facts.

Three weeks later, I found myself in another hole, right after the
Virginia Tech shooting. From the beginning of that event, it was clear
that mobile phones were the technology in the best position to help the
killer's targets help themselves and each other. As it happens, I knew
about ways that mobile phones and services could be made to provide
additional help in an emergency like this one. That's because I advise a
company that provides cell phones and services to universities. These
phones not only have features made to help in emergencies on campuses,
but they are open for users to develop their own applications and other
improvements. In e-mail conversations right after the shooting news
broke, I advised this company to do the sensible thing and not promote
its “brand” or its services, but instead quietly to look for ways
everybody could learn from the tragedy there. I didn't say any of that
on my blog, or anywhere else in public print. But, I did say that stuff
in a private e-mail to somebody who put that e-mail on his blog without
asking me first. I called and asked him to take it down, which he did,
but by then that cat was out of the bag. RSS feeds had gone out. Another
blogger published it, accusing me of taking advantage of a tragedy to
advance a commercial cause. (Although he said it in far less polite
terms than those.) In a comment under that blog post, I said the
republished post was a private e-mail that was never meant to be blogged.
But the blogger left it up, as an act of snarky passive aggression.

Then, several days after the shooting, NBC went public with the package
of pictures and computer files mailed to it by Cho Seung-hui during a
pause in his shooting rampage. In a private e-mail exchange with a small
circle of individuals, a thoughtful discussion followed—about whether
or not NBC should have released the whole pile of files, once the police had
said doing that was okay with them. I privately took the position that
the files should be released. Others didn't. Discussion among
individuals was civil, thoughtful. But after I blogged my opinion about
the matter (offering full respect to other positions), darkness fell in
two forms. First was dismissive nonconversation about the subject on
other blogs. Second was the time-suck that the whole discussion turned into.

In the midst of that, a reporter with NPR (also a blogger of far more
prominence than my own) asked me if I'd be willing to share my thoughts
about the Cho files in an interview. So I did. As an old Radio Guy, I
thought I did a pretty good job. So did the interviewer/blogger. But did
I shed much light? Did anybody? I don't know. When I heard myself on the
radio, I had to admit that I sounded like yet another talking head. As I
look around the blogosphere for illumination on the matter, I can't find
much. Did we learn anything? Not much, I don't think.

When blogging came along, I welcomed it as a big advance over other
public discussion systems, such as Usenet and IRC—for three reasons. First,
nearly every blog is controlled by an individual. It is that person's soap box,
pulpit, personal journal. Second, blogs are syndicated,
meaning that others can subscribe to their feeds, or to searches for
subjects that might lead readers to a blogger's original thinking on a
subject. And third, blogging seems especially well suited to what I
called “rolling snowballs”. That's what happens when a good idea gets
rolling and then is enlarged by others who add to it.

Blogging also has a provisional quality. You don't have to hold down one
corner of a “debate” like the yapping faces on CNN and Fox News. You can
think out loud about a subject that other people can weigh in on. You
can scaffold an understanding, raise a barn where new knowledge can hang
out while more formal accommodations are built.

In this last respect, blogging is a lot like open-source code
development. Anybody with something useful to contribute is welcome to
come in and help out. As with open-source code development, the results
of idea-building on blogs have NEA qualities: Nobody owns them,
Everybody can use them, and Anybody can improve them.

This provisional quality relieves blogging of the need to put everything
in final draft form, which can be labor-intensive. Blogging is a kind of
half bakery, falling somewhere between public e-mail (a way to write
for “cc:world”) and polished journalism of the sort we write for print
publications like this one. In fact, lots of ideas I've written about in
Linux Journal were half-baked first on my blog. Software as
construction, the Live Web, independent identity, the Giant Zero, VRM
and The Because Effect are a few that come to mind.

But, it ain't working like it used to. The black holes are getting more
common and sucking up more time. The old leverage also seems to be
drooping a bit. And, I don't think it's just me.

In fact, I see myself as a kind of controlled study. That's because my
blog hasn't changed much in the 7.5 years it has been running. The
“A-list” label (one I have never liked) owes more to longevity and
reputation than it does to actual popularity. Or perhaps it applies to a
relative popularity that has long since faded to B-list or lower status.
Daily visitor traffic has stayed in the same range—a few hundred to a
few thousand—since soon after the turn of the millennium. Back then,
those were big numbers. Today, they're peanuts next to BoingBoing, Kos,
Huffington Post and lots of other blogs. In other words, the blogosphere
has grown while my readership has not. At one point, my blog was as high
as #9 on the Technorati Top 100. Today, it's #609.

I don't regard that slide as a Bad Thing. In fact, I think having a
limited but persistent appeal is a Good Thing. Judging from e-mails,
mentions and inbound links, my blog always has been read by a lot of
very thoughtful, engaging and interesting people. But, I sense a decline
of influence and involvement, and a rise in barely civil exchanges that
fail to cause much progress. Maybe that's me. Or, maybe it's just the
ratios. Hey, even thoughtful, engaged and interesting people have a lot
more places to go on the Web, every day.

Meanwhile, my work as a fellow at Harvard's Berkman Center and UCSB's
CITS is getting more rewarding every day. Real progress is being made on
projects at both places. And, both are doing a better job of spilling
ideas and material into my work as an editor here at Linux
Journal. The
contrast between those activities and the Olde Blog are getting higher.

I can still find a lot of interesting stuff on Technorati, but I feel
like I need to navigate my way past more and more noise thrown off by
popular culture. (Disclosure: I'm on the company's advisory board.)

Now I'm looking for something that will do for blogging what blogging
did for Usenet: move past it in a significant way. We need a better way
for thinking people to share ideas and improve the world. What would
that be?

It might help to think of the answer as the opposite of a black hole.

Doc Searls is Senior Editor of Linux Journal. He is
also a Visiting
Scholar at the University of California at Santa Barbara and a Fellow
with the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University.

Comment viewing options

Lately your columns are moving further from the real content of Linux Journal. How exactly is this relevant to Linux? Sure, blogging is like Open source, but then talk about that rather than the long winded article above.

I was sad when I saw Nick Petreley's repeated articles of rage and slander. He has toned down these days, but even this month's article is fairly pointless. You could leave that page blank and nobody would notice.

There is so many interesting areas to be covered: Dell's new Ubuntu machines. Interview Mark Shuttleworth, or someone from Dell. They'd be delighted, and us readers will know the story behind the action. Talk about ATI's driver announcements, and the AMD driver development. There's some recent Microsoft Xandros announcements in the news. Of course, there is a lot of tech changing behind the scenes, and that could always be covered in an editorial.

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